No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

From Forced Pregnancy to Forced Surgery

From Forced Pregnancyto ForcedSurgery or once I did not feel isolated in my outrage: the courts ruled, and virtually everyone agreed, that in the Nancy Klein case the right-to-life movement had gone too far. A stranger purporting to represent the fetus of a comatose woman and challenging her husband's right to authorize an abortion on her behalf so violated accepted canons of privacy that even Cardinal O'Connor felt constrained to sayhe understood the husband's action, though of course he could not condone it. The case was a particularembarrassmentto those who argue that opposition to abortion expresses concern for all life. Doctors who testified in court were divided on whether an abortion would aid Klein's recovery, as her husband contended; in any case, it doesn't take medical expertise to surmise that when a woman has suffered a massive brain injury, the extra strain pregnancy puts on the body can hardly help her struggle to heal. But to the would-be guardian of her fetus, Klein's health and for all practical purposes her life were expendable. From his perspective the question was not why take any risk, however small, that continuing the pregnancy could impede Klein's recovery, but why put the interests of this woman, whose prognosis is poor anyway, above her usefulness as a vessel. It reminded me of the debates on criteriafor publicly funded abortions that went on in Congress and the state legislatures a decade or so ago—in particular,I recallone legislator suggesting that the government should pay for an abortion only if the chance of the "mother's" dying from the pregnancy was at least 50percent. Ironically, the grossnessof the Kleincasetended to obscure a more basic issue: What was it doing in court in the first place? Since Nancy Klein would have had a clear legal right to demand an abortion, the F From Forced Pregnancy to Forced Surgery 91 normal procedure—as for anyother treatment—would have been to allow her husband to act as her surrogate in making the decision. Nor was he under any legal obligation to prove the operation would help her recover. (Suppose he "merely" believed that she would not want to havea babywhile facing severedisability—or that she would want her husband to be free to concentrate on caring for kert] Yet the hospital administration refused to permit an abortion without a court order. This action and the subsequent harassment of Klein's husband (which is what the court fight amounted to) reflect not only the antiabortionists' success at creating a political atmosphere that subverts the intent of Roe v. Wade, but the impact of a much more ambitious—and dangerous—movement for "fetal rights." The right-to-life movement has always claimed to be demanding equal legal rights for an unrecognized class of people. But even assuming the full human status of fetuses—an assumption I'm willing to entertain for the sake of the argument—there is a fundamental flaw in the movement's logic. Every fetus grows inside a woman, making active demands on her body and mind, and there is no such thing in our legal system as a human right to appropriate someone else's body for one's own use. No one, for instance, can be forced to donate a kidney, or for that matter undergo such an innocuous procedure as giving blood, even to save a life. We may admire people who make physical sacrifices or take physical risks on behalf of their fellow human beings—and we may,depending on the circumstances, deeply disapprove of those who don't—but most of us recognize that to compel such generosity would be to deprive people of anessential freedom. What right-to-lifers are really demanding is that we make an exception for fetuses—or rather, continue making the exception that's always been implied in women's traditional obligation to nurture life regardless of their own needs. It's feminists who are insisting that the treatment of a class of people—women—be brought into line with accepted standards of human rights. The idea that the fetus isaseparateindividualwith rights that must be weighed against the interests of the woman who carries it has implications far beyond abortion prohibition. After all, if the fetus has a right to life, why not a right to health? Certainly, even those of us N O M O...